Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.
Our family is very tight. Just like any family, we have our ups and downs, but the love is always going to be there. I try to go to my parents' house as much as I can.
My parents would always trace the sign of the cross on our foreheads before they kissed us goodnight.
My parents got me a sewing machine for Christmas during my senior year of high school. I made three pieces of clothing and had a fashion show at the end of the year, where we had to wear the clothes that we made. I took it to a whole new level; I made all my friends clothes.
My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese. I was raised in New York and spent two years in Rio. My parents met at the University of Southern Mississippi, and they had me there, and then we moved to New York. I'm not very familiar with Mississippi.
My parents came from a poor background and worked their way up because of education. They saw it as a way to succeed. So they cared about me getting straight A grades when I was growing up.
We choose our sex, our color, our country, and then we look around for the particular set of parents who will mirror the pattern we are bringing in to work on in this lifetime.
The first concert that my parents took me to was in this canyon in Saudi Arabia called Buttermilk Canyon. You sleep under the stars in the desert, and ex-pats - German, Swiss, Canadian, American - would play classical music that filled the whole canyon.
My parents always taught me never to take anything for granted because it can be taken away from you like that, especially when it comes to looks. I could get into a car crash tomorrow and disfigure my face. So I have to stay grounded.
Bruce Wayne is Batman. He became Batman the instant his parents were murdered. Batman needs Bruce, however hollow that identity feels to him from time to time. Bruce keeps Batman human.
When I was born, my parents - my mother especially - couldn't come to terms with that fact that they had another baby girl. I know these stories in detail because every time a guest visited, or there was a gathering, they repeated this story in front of me that how I was the unwanted child.
My parents, Romanian immigrants, struggled to provide me a better life than the ones they had left in their homeland. They worked hard to give me every opportunity in life, and once I showed natural talent as a young gymnast, they spent every last penny on my training.
Civil rights happened because youth got involved. The youth stood up and helped to break the pattern that their parents had got accustomed to living. The next generation has to take that stand for whatever it is, socially, that they are involved in.
Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.
I was a pop-music junkie. My parents were into Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. They weren't too excited when I had Aretha or the Stones pumping.
My parents wanted me to become a national athlete.
In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.
As an adult, I can't blame my parents any more.
I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn't want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.
My parents never looked at my acting as a career. They saw it as a way to help provide for the household.
Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition.
I had two different kind of parents. My mother was obsessive with movie stars and cinema and Hollywood because she worked in movies. And my father was obsessed with beauty everywhere - in art, in nature, animals.
I'm lucky to have parents who used to be bodybuilders! They help me keep fit by going to the gym and training with me. I'm also addicted to Cardio Barre classes and hiking.
Even before my parents died, I felt all the responsibility to my family. I don't know why. In any business, any relationship, if something goes wrong, I feel I am to blame. It's something inside me.
I know that collector types can be a pain in the neck and seem perpetually frozen in time - or at least in their parents' basement - but someone has to look out for the past, lest it slip away forever.
I can remember my sister and me volunteering for Nixon. My parents liked him. I liked my parents. So I figured he was good.
My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.
I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry at the dinner table.
Young people all over the world are very frustrated. They are very disillusioned. Many of them are turning their backs on religion. They are walking away from the faith of their parents, and most of this is because religion has failed them.
I know I'm British. I haven't spent much time in the U.K., but my parents are British, my family heritage is British, so if I wasn't British, what would I be? I am British.
My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.
I basically applied to law school as a way of telling my parents that I wasn't going to medical school.
I played softball and basketball growing up. I really wanted to play football but both parents said no. I was mad for a second, then got over it. Now, just because I'm tall doesn't mean I can play basketball. I was waaaaay better at swinging a bat.
The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' - it is about finding your place in the world.
My parents... has always wanted all their kids to go to at least one year of Bible college after high school. I always knew that I was on my way to Moody Bible Institute when I graduated high school.
I had been a real problem child, but once I got into acting, my parents never had any more trouble with me because all of that energy was directed in a positive way.
